Development of the cultural tailoring score (CTS): a scoring instrument to assess cultural tailoring of health messaging
Background Cultural tailoring of health information has been associated with better health outcomes in minority populations. While contractors and partner organizations are asked to produce culturally appropriate materials, there are no government-endorsed metrics to assess the “cultural content” of...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Taylor & Francis Group
2025-12-01
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| Series: | Health Literacy and Communication Open |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/28355245.2025.2459199 |
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| Summary: | Background Cultural tailoring of health information has been associated with better health outcomes in minority populations. While contractors and partner organizations are asked to produce culturally appropriate materials, there are no government-endorsed metrics to assess the “cultural content” of health communication materials.Aims To fill this implementation gap we created a cultural tailoring score that can be used to guide creation or pretesting of health communication materials. It is based on research demonstrating the importance of: (1) Levels of engagement of the intended audience in the production, (2) use of understandable and culturally meaningful language, incorporation of (3) surface cultural cues and (4) deeper cultural constructs, (5) presence of a narrative to bind the information and cultural elements into a relatable story, and (6) factors associated with concrete psychological construal level (“now,” “here,” “you”).Methods We document a trial of the cultural tailoring score conducted by graduate students identifying as Filipino, Haitian, or Hispanic/Latinx reviewing 17 ads promoting COVID-19 vaccine that had been pretested during the pandemic for perceived effectiveness with convenience samples of these same ethnic groups.Results We achieved a combined Spearman’s Rank Correlation rho of 0.45 between the cultural tailoring score and perceived effectiveness ranking of all 17 ads (individual cultural groupings range from Spearman’s rho 0.45 to 0.90), suggesting that cultural components were moderately to strongly associated with perceived effectiveness. Open-ended comments from pretesting respondents support this finding and suggest that cultural components facilitated what the Elaboration Likelihood Model describes as central processing of the main health messages, thereby enhancing health literacy.Discussion The paper discusses recommendations for further development and testing of the CTS to produce a simple tool to guide future multicultural health communication materials production or pretesting. |
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| ISSN: | 2835-5245 |